In the case study presented in the July 31, 2007 Peer Incite Meeting, IT wanted to radically change the philosophy of remote recovery, and build resilience into both the applications and infrastructure. Rather than testing remote disaster recovery as a special case a few times a year, an expensive process which introduces risk of data loss in and of itself, they wanted to be able to switch applications to any node, local or remote, as a normal part of operations.

The key to realizing this dream is to have fail-over and fail-back mechanisms working with zero data loss at both the production sites and disaster recovery sites.

Action Item: To ensure success in disaster recovery, procedures should be part of normal operations and not require unusual 'gymnastics.' While the circumstances of a disaster are most certainly unusual and unpredictable, simplifying the processes around recovery are critical to success.